Comment by yndoendo

> So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?

I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.

The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent

$300 USD per month sounds insanely expensive

Norway accepts they are a homogeneous country. Americans lose their minds at the thought

I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.

Even if you assume the statistics for hyperactivity are correct, how did the researchers decide which statistics were relevant?

In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.

For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:

"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality

"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).

There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."

The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:

"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."

You may be surprised to learn that Quebec is not in America.

Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.

Wait a minute… that sounds like…

Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.

It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.

I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.

The Economist is a capitalism cheerleader, so no, they would not care for that study.

If the tax man can't see it, it doesn't exist.

.

Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.

Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.

The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".

Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.

They would need to be building tanks and airplanes.

I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.

Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.

I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.

I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.

Obamacare is threatening to capsize the country with its cost.

America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.

US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...

Reality doesn't match your claim, for example when one looks at European countries who have all of that.

Why is "the economy" our highest priority here?

Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.

And yet every single socialist, European country is behind the US in terms of their economic output.

Totally agree.

However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.

Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.

In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?

Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.

This comment is sort of weird. Like you’re finding technically true rebuttals that don’t really refute the high level point.

> Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.

What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?

Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).

Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.

I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.

Every nation that exists or ever existed took land by force. And yes, there were public works projects.

The government did not engage in welfare until FDR.

LOL, thanks for the kind words! I just happened to like working on compilers, as few programmers will touch them. If you're ever in the Seattle area, we have a monthly D Coffee Haus where we drink and talk about languages, compilers, airplanes, cars, and physics. All are welcome!

(Even C++ people show up! All in good fun.)

The price of freedom is always paid in blood.

> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.

I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.

Yes I know about that theory. But it has problems.

When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.

Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.

The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!

As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?

There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.

I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.

I grew up next to the Hispanic neighborhood in Arizona, and the schools I attended were about 30% Hispanic.

> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent

It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.

The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.

When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.

Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).

> 1% of the recipients are fraudulent

Google sez:

"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."

Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?

A mentor once told me that telling people something is much less effective than leading them to realize it themselves.

Of course you're right, but spelling it out explicitly leads to a partisan flame ware.

Turns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors.

Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.

It turns out that the promise to hurt other people more is a winning strategy.

Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.

We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.

We developed vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. If that’s “feeble” then I guess I’ll take it every time.